


they say some things just don't wash out

by harperuth



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Developing Relationship, Disordered Eating, Energon (Transformers), M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Transformers Plug and Play Sexual Interfacing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:27:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23366923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harperuth/pseuds/harperuth
Summary: The data continued to coalesce with every passing moment he could watch Rodimus and still he couldn’t come to a conclusion.By all accounts it didn’t make any sense.- - -Or, Ultra Magnus struggles to understand Rodimus and his unorthodox fueling habits.
Relationships: Rodimus Prime/Ultra Magnus
Comments: 32
Kudos: 127





	they say some things just don't wash out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [auto_thots (towards_morning)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/towards_morning/gifts).



> ages ago on twitter i yelled at james about how i thought rodi would have food trauma after the life he's led and anyway. here we are. happy birthday bud, and thank you for every bit of creativity you keep inspiring. 
> 
> translations/explanations for things i invented are in the end notes.
> 
> title is from 'some things don't wash out' by you, me, and everyone we know

Magnus would like to think he would have noticed before Drift said anything.

“Rodi, what’re you doing?” Drift murmured, obviously not intending to broadcast the conversation, “You hate caesium. Go get a new one.”

“It’s fine,” Rodimus hissed back, taking another slow sip at his energon, “I don’t—”

“There’s nothing to waste,” Drift said softly, when it became clear nothing more was forthcoming, “You can toss it in the recycle and get something you like.”

“It’s _fine_ ,” Rodimus hissed more insistently. He continued to fuel.

Drift’s optics flicked up to Ultra Magnus’s, his stare acidic. A low band comm hit his suite.

**Not a single. Farking. Word.**

Ultra Magnus nodded and kept on his way to the dispenser.

\- - -

Magnus would have loved to have left it at that. 

The Lost Light proved to be enough of a terrifying and invigorating disaster to manage with every new shift cycle. He had more than enough to occupy his processor, and shouldn’t be thinking about his Captain’s apparent fueling quirks. He had never thought about Tyrest as much as he did Rodimus. Then...look how that turned out.

The fact of the matter was that Rodimus was always occupying at least one section of his processor space. Running tallies and lists and information and observations and spreadsheets and quantitative data and qualitative data and he didn’t know what any of it _meant_ , he didn’t know what _Rodimus_ meant. Rodimus was— He was—

Rodimus was a comma splice. He was a dangling modifier. He was a sentence ended with a preposition.

The thought caught on an autonomic process he hadn’t even realized he _had_ , shunting itself to a list he was horrified to realize was titled “Illogical Metaphors RE: Rodimus.”

\- - -

Magnus found himself watching Rodimus’ fueling habits from then on. 

New lists and tallies and spreadsheets generated. Rodimus fueled every Alpha shift at the same time, something incredibly out of sync for how unstructured he lived the rest of his life. He also only fueled with a half ration. It had taken Magnus several cycles to determine the truth of that. He had assumed that he had just missed Rodimus ingesting the other half.

Rodimus took his fuel with no additives, but were there additives present (the dispensers on board occasionally fritzed) he would still take them. He ingested a lot of caesium. Magnus wasn’t sure why the dispensers mistakenly deployed that additive more than any other, but he was uncomfortably aware now of the blankness of Rodimus’ face plates as he carefully and measuredly ingested fuel that he was not enjoying.

The data continued to coalesce with every passing moment he could watch Rodimus and still he couldn’t come to a conclusion. 

By all accounts it didn’t make any _sense_.

\- - -

“Captain, I need your glyphs on these as soon as possible, and I don’t appreciate you chasing away the drones I send with them—” Ultra Magnus stopped abruptly as he looked up.

Rodimus flushed, digit popping out of his mouth, “Um.”

Magnus took in the packet of powdered energon on the corner of the desk and Rodimus’ carefully blank expression slipping away into shame. Everything whirled through his processor in a nanoklik and Drift’s comm echoed in its wake.

“Could you please sign these?” Magnus held out the datapads, shooting one last look at the energon packet before firmly affixing his gaze on Rodimus’ servos. There was the smallest build up of powdered energon and oral lubricant sludge in the seams of his primary digit.

“Sure,” Rodimus scribbled on each pad without reading them. Magnus couldn’t find it in him to admonish him.

“Thank you,” Magnus gathered them back up and flicked his optics back up to Rodimus’, “I apologize for barging in like that.”

“No worries,” Rodimus smiled, but the expression was a horrible facsimile of his usual carefree nature. Ultra Magnus nodded and fled.

Powdered energon. Meant as a last resort on long field missions when rations were gone, or when the glow of energon had the potential to compromise positioning. It could be mixed with galinstan or something similar to approach a liquid energon equivalent. 

They all tasted terrible.

\- - - 

Magnus did not catch Rodimus with any more packets of powdered energon. 

He did occasionally find him with aliphatic ester clusters. Waxy energon processing buildup. Rodimus apparently still had brittlezinc somehow. Powdered energon treated with zinc, mixed up and fired back down four times over. Utterly tasteless with a penchant for cracking denta. 

Rodimus wasn’t obvious about it. In fact, if he hadn’t been purposely watching for it Magnus was sure that he would never have noticed at all.

The strange parade of snacks didn’t end with fueling methods that Magnus hadn’t seen since the height of the war. Ultra Magnus was fairly certain he caught sight of mechaorganic scraps disappearing into Rodimus’ intake. Ick-Yak plating. Petrorabbit struts. He had tried to blame what he thought was a trick of the optics on the _entire scraplet_ he saw Rodimus ingest. Unfortunately, previously gathered data did not allow him to do so.

It all continued to collect in his processor. 

He didn’t _understand_ , so he continued to gather information. It kept coming back to _nothing_. Rodmius’ fuel habits were completely beyond anything he could comprehend, but he could not stop himself from seeking out the data.

\- - -

“You need to stop,” Rodimus’ words were clearly meant as an order, but the wavering huff didn’t ping at Magnus’s coding the way orders were meant to. He watched Rodimus, who stomped forward, forcing Magnus backwards against the wall of the hallway.

“Pardon?” Ultra Magnus forced the idle work he had been doing into a lower tier subsystem, turning his primary processor to Rodimus.

“Stop—” Rodimus cycled his intake, and looked away, “Stop watching me. I don’t know what you think I’ve done, or I’m going to do, but I haven’t— I’m not— Just _stop_.”

“I can’t,” Magnus replied, so surprised at being caught out that he couldn’t have said anything else.

“Mags—” Rodimus grit his denta, but Magnus's vocalizer was apparently running on its own coding out of his control.

“I can’t” He said again, “I’m trying to understand, but it— you don’t _make sense_ and I need to understand but I need more information to do that, but none of the information is ever _enough_ so I need...I need more.”

Rodimus finally lifted his gaze up from the floor, staring at him in astonishment.

“You make me use run on sentences,” Ultra Magnus said, entirely helpless to stop now.

At some point he had hunched down far enough that Rodimus was able to push up and press their lip plates together.

\- - - 

It continued in Rodimus’ hab. 

There were bits of packaging barely peeking out all over the place. Again, were he not looking for them he wasn’t sure he’d have ever seen them. Powdered energon. Energon crush. Aliphatic ester clusters.

Rodimus would press him down onto the padded seating of the gathering room, and Magnus swore he heard something shifting under those pads. He had checked once, while Rodimus was in the other room and found several different varieties of energon crush. Largely caesium flavored.

Some of the mystery of Rodimus cleared up bit by bit. 

He still didn’t understand the fueling.

\- - -

“Magnus, Mags, please,” Rodimus gasped, and it took Magnus an entire klik to register the digits running across his femoral port cover. His modesty programming and social protocols ran in circles and paradox errors cropped up, a wave of hot charge running down his spinal strut when he realized just how much he _wanted_ this.

“Yes,” Ultra Magnus rooted through his coding, finding the command to let the cover lift away. Rodmius was several steps ahead of him, plug already out and pushing into Magnus’s port. Magnus shivered, hot energy pouring from Rodimus _into_ him. 

He fumbled for his own plug, dropping it twice as Rodimus rolled chaotic data through his processor, warm sparks on his firewalls, licking its way across orderly protocols and subroutines. He clamped his servo around Rodimus’ thigh, pollical digit tracing across his port. Rodimus jerked, data stalling long enough for Magnus to loosen his grip and finally push his own plug in.

“Oh,” Rodimus shuddered and collapsed forward, tucking his face into Magnus’s intake. Magnus brushed carefully along his coding, sliding up firewalls in a delicate tease he had always favored. Rodimus groaned.

He was picking his way across Rodimus’ more surface level coding, trying not to show just how much satisfaction he felt, having _Rodimus_ shuddering in _his_ lap, when he noticed. 

“Why are your fuel levels at only thirty eight percent?” He asked before he could even stop to consider the consequences. 

Rodimus froze, his presence slowly retreating from Magnus’s consciousness, “Stop.”

Magnus removed their plugs as quickly and carefully as he was able, all traces of charge dissipating in the wake of his own horror. He couldn't work out if it was horror with himself or Rodimus. “I’m—”

“Don't,” Rodimus was venting harshly, but he didn't pull away, leaving his face tucked into Magnus’s intake, “Gimme a klik.”

Magnus smoothed a servo down Rodimus’ back, listening to his vents, the slow clicking of winding down cooling fans. 

“Not a lot of fuel in Nyon,” Rodimus eventually said, “And then there was the shortage, and the war, and it just. Rung said it’s normal. Sort of. Full tanks hurt. I snack when I can on what I can. I know everyone hated the powdered energon, but it’s not the worst and Rung said Ratchet said it’s really good for what I need.”

Magnus let the information hit the several data clusters he had been gathering and several open ended processes wrapped themselves up.

“I’m sorry I said something,” He finally said, “It wasn’t my business.”

“You worry,” Rodimus shrugged, “You shouldn’t stop doing that.”

Magnus held him closer and dropped his head down to rest on Rodimus’.

\- - -

It wasn’t just Rodimus, now that he was aware. 

Trailcutter carried his own cube seals around and never left anything but an empty cube. Even the smallest trace was stored away for later. Swerve had always had the highest use of the recycler, dribs and drabs from his bar collected at the end of each night and poured carefully in. Magnus considered Helex and cancelled the audit he had planned. Drift always kept a servo on whatever he was fueling with, optics casing the room carefully.

The House of Ambus had never wanted for fuel, neither during the shortage nor after Dominus’s disappearance. Tyrest had always kept his subjects well fueled and ready to deploy at any moment. In the midst of the war Ultra Magnus had made sure that his units always had enough energon.

It wasn’t something he had needed to consider before.

He was able to close and file away several open ended subprocesses that had been lurking as new data interpretations answered questions that had previously only thrown up errors. He wondered what other information was beyond his grasp due to ignorance and circumstance.

\- - -

The dispenser hummed and clanked, caesium additive pouring in along with the energon.

Magnus reached around and swiped the half ration before Rodimus could touch it, “Get another.”

“Mags, seriously,” Rodimus’ voice was tight, “I’ll drink it, it’s fine.”

“I’m not throwing it out,” Magnus hummed, lifting the cube to his own lip plates, “I’ll drink it, you get another. I need an extra half ration for my frame size anyway, and I like caesium.”

He had no opinion on caesium, but he did like the way Rodimus relaxed and reached for a new cube.

**Author's Note:**

> powdered energon - an MRE equivalent, when i explained it to k they compared it to powdered milk.  
> galinstan - very real actually, this is a gallium based alloy liquid metal  
> aliphatic ester - y'all did you know mallowcremes have WAX in them and that wax is primarily made of aliphatic ester? now you do.  
> brittlezinc - and equivalent to hardtack
> 
> come yell at me about robots on twitter @floralpunkcfb


End file.
